Kenyan agency banking as a service provider Tanda is raising an ongoing pre-Series A round of funding to accelerate product development and customer acquisition in Kenya and beyond.
Founded in 2018, Tanda allows shop owners to access inventory on credit, and also become access points for essential services such as airtime, utility payments, banking and insurance services for their customers.
The platform aggregates all major financial services providers, allowing agents to sell various digital products, while it also delivers essential goods to shops. It also extends unsecured credit to its agents.
Over the past four years, the company has processed over four million transactions and served more than 30,000 businesses, 800,000 people, and over 100 developers, including Twiga Foods and Bento.
The new investment, which follows a seed round early last year, comes from existing investor HAVAÍC, as well as three other investors, including DFS Lab. The funding will be used by Tanda to invest in key strategic partners, accelerate product development, and scale in Kenya and East Africa over the next 15 months.
Tanda is also rolling out a new brand identity to better represent its developing product portfolio, including Tanda Trader, an app for businesses to accept payments, sell digital products, and access financing; Tanda Pocket, a virtual wallet with digital cards to spend, track finances, and budget; and Tanda I/O, an API library that simplifies how businesses collect and allocate payments across agents, mobile networks, and utility service providers.
“Our new products and growing distribution will open up opportunities for Tanda and our ecosystem partners to continue solving challenges for the majority of Africans locked out of the formal financial services ecosystem. We also look forward to deepening our customer relationships and growing into new and exciting African markets,” said Tanda founder and CEO Geoffrey Mulei.
“Tanda is a huge win for tech companies in Africa,” said Rob Heath, partner at HAVAÍC. “With no access to financial services, people and merchants in Africa deal almost exclusively in cash. Tanda’s tech enables them to pay and receive cash in exchange for digital services that would otherwise have been out of reach. We are so pleased our journey with Tanda continues. And we cannot wait to see what the future holds.”
HAVAÍC’s has also recently made investments in FinAccess, ShopEx, and Talk360.
